1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system and in particular to a method and apparatus for processing data. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a method, apparatus, and computer instructions for facilitating communications between components.
2. Description of Related Art
A virtual enterprise may provide various services within an organization or to users on the Internet. A virtual enterprise is a business entity constructed from organizationally and geographically distributed units or groups. For example, a company, such as International Business Machines Corporation, has various microelectronics providers and independent resellers. The company along with these providers and resellers forms a virtual enterprise if a system is implemented to integrate key business systems with participating business units from these different companies. In providing these services, the proper functioning of components across the enterprise is essential. These other components include, for example, servers, routers, printers, gateways, and firewalls. A failure in one or more of these components may result in an inability to provide the services that are expected by users or customers of the virtual enterprise. All of these components are found in a network data processing system, which may have various sizes depending on the enterprise. Additionally, these components may be located in diverse geographic locations. As a result, management information about all of these components must be collected.
The system management information about the components are correlated and analyzed to access the performance and availability of a particular service being provided by the virtual enterprise. System management information is the information needed to monitor and manage a specific component in a data processing system. The information collected may include information with respect to loading or requests being made to various components. Further, this management information also may include, for example, status information about the availability of resources within a particular component. These resources may include available processing power, available memory, and available storage space on hard disk drives.
This information may be collected in many different ways. For example, many systems include agents that collect and send information regarding components through specialized and proprietary protocols. Traditional remote invocation processes for communicating with management agents are constrained by the interfaces and objects exposed by the agent. Extending and/or upgrading these interfaces and objects is time consuming. Additionally, these extensions or upgrades may be incompatible with older clients or devices.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have an improved method, apparatus, and computer instructions for communications with agents.